hieroglyfic dreams

Yesterday I got my packet of Postcards to Swing States from the Progressive Turnout Project and I've started work on them. (Volunteers get a list of voters and addresses and a set of three messages which have been shown to increase turnout, and handwrite their choice of message and the voter's name and address on the card, add their own stamp, and mail on the specified date. It's a way to donate money, i.e. the stamp cost, plus a little time; presumably having the card handwritten makes it more likely that recipients will actually read them.) At first I was a little confused that my list consisted of Texas addresses, but when I looked at their website I saw that they are also including possible-swing Congressional districts, and of course Cruz' Senate seat is not completely out of reach, so, I'm good with helping toward that!

I've also completed the on-line training to be a door knocker for the PTP in Arizona, which is not where I live but close enough to swing through in my camper van for a little politicking vacation. I won't get out until late October, after Yuletide assignments are sent out, but that will be a nice time of year to be in AZ.

But the real reason I'm posting this is because my "politics" icon is rather out of date, as it depicts neither my current fandom nor my current president! So I was hoping that one of you nice people in my circle who is better than I am at graphic arts (a very low bar) could pretty please make me an icon with the Shepard Fairey Forward poster and the words "strong female character"? Thanks in advance! I dedicate my next postcard to a Texas voter to YOU!

I remembered a few days late to switch my default icon to Medusa Santa for December. Lookit all the cute little Santa hats on the snakies!

❄ My Yuletide story is done and at the beta, hooray! I had let all the pinch hits go by while I was working on it, telling myself that it would not be a good idea to add to my obligations while I was struggling with a moderately complex and long story, but basically three minutes after I sent it off to the beta, a new batch of pinch hits came through. And hey, this one asks for one of the fandoms I originally offered! So, oops, writing again...

❄ Speaking of Yuletide, sort of, for the first time in a long time I won't be snuggling into a blankie with my laptop to spend Christmas morning reading the collection, as we've decided to take a long weekend in Santa Fe. B used to live there and has fond memories of the farolito walk on Christmas Eve, and we'd been sort of planning to get down there anyway once we got a new vehicle which we would trust to make the drive (which we did in October, but have been busy since) in order to visit the House of Eternal Return. I'm not bringing the laptop, just the phone, so though I might do some reading, I won't be making my usual rec posts (or commenting on my gift other than a quickie) until at least Wednesday.

❄ Speaking of my phone - I got a new one! We decided to splurge on the latest greatest and got Pixels to replace our Nexus 5 phones (which were only 3 years old, but can't upgrade to Android 7). Both the phone and the OS are pretty nifty, but the best thing about the Pixel is that you can use Project Fi, which of course we immediately signed up to do. (This is Google's phone service, which partners with multiple carriers such that it uses the fastest available service among wifi and three 4G LTE networks.) Not only is it less expensive than our old StraightTalk prepaid plan (if you use a LOT of cellular data it might not be, but we don't) it includes 135 countries for which there are unlimited international texts (either texts to numbers in those countries, or texts sent while in that country); fairly cheap phone calls to foreign numbers, and fixed $0.20/min while roaming in those countries, and data at the same rate as in the US ($10/GB prorated). If only we'd had this two years ago in Canada!

❄ I need to get back to doing the bullet journal thing. Inspired by several people in my DW circle, I started one in a partly-used blank book, and I kept it up until my Thanksgiving vacation, but since then I have let it slide. I had told myself that if I did it for the rest of the year I would let myself use my beautiful Hobbit-themed blank book (someone here gave it to me, right?) for next year. (Bullet journaling, if you don't know, is essentially making an on-the-fly planner with divisions and specific pages that are actually useful to you, rather than pre-printed things that might not be relevant.) I am much better with paper to-do lists than I am with online/phone ones, so this seemed to work pretty well for keeping my tasks organized and top-of-mind, but alas my motivation still sucks, so I look at my nicely-laid-out list of THINGS TO DO and immediately see the items that have been languishing for days...and then I ignore them. Oops?

❄ Finally, there is a trailer for Bon Cop Bad Cop 2!!!! Two versions: French subtitles for the English dialogue and English subtitles for the French dialogue. It brought back ALL THE FEELS. I loved that ridiculous movie so much. I even made a vid for it for Festivids 2010, and requested it for Yuletide 2007 and received a fabulous story, Plus ça change by cjmarlowe.

And that brings me full circle back to Yuletide!

Time to put the Santa hat on! I still get a kick out of all the little snakies with their little hatlets.

A couple of recs for stories that mix up canons:

Fire Working (4017 words) by melannen
Fandoms: Dresden Files - Jim Butcher, Tale of the Five Series - Diane Duane
Rating: General Audiences
Summary: Herewiss goes through a Door that is probably not the Door into Starlight, and meets a man who uses the Fire.

This is a brilliant crossover: Herewiss and Sunspark go through a Door into...Chicago. I think you really do need to be at least familiar with both canons for it to resonate with you, but if you are, I think you'll love it.

Warships of Letters by heather_mist
Fandom: Aubrey-Maturin Series - Patrick O'Brian
Rating: General Audiences (femslash)
Summary: The romantic correspondence between two of history's most important horses warships.

This pitch-perfect pastiche of Warhorses of Letters (which I, er, wrote about in locked posts here on LJ and here on Dreamwidth, but you don't need to know that canon or even, really, Aubrey-Maturin) made me laugh like a loon. You should not be concerned at all about your rear view, it is a perfectly lovely little stern and not at all saggy (yes, I looked!) – and you do have the most cunning little quarterdeck, which must make other brigs of your size terribly jealous.

Originally I wasn't going to participate in blnchflr's Mini Meta Fest, but she posted that after assigning prompts, there was one lonely prompt left - so I took it: Userpics in posting/commenting.

In addition to my fandom presence on LJ and DW, I have a nonfandom flist, a Facebook identity (FB), and I participate in a web-based running forum (RWOL). The first two have multiple userpics available for each posting, the latter two have a single (but changeable at will) userpic per identity. Most of my FB friends use their real names as their usernames, but not all do; few people do on RWOL or on LJ/DW, although several do on my RL flist.

I did a little count of each of these (most recent friendsfeed or equivalent) to classify what kind of pictures people are using to represent themselves. Here are some examples from my own icons to illustrate the (somewhat arbitrary) categories I picked:

( Pictures don't count against the 300-word limit, do they? Because a single one is worth 1000 words, and therefore, totally blows it! )

The vast majority of userpics on FB and RWOL are "Self". Even people who don't use real names on RWOL use their real faces. On fandom LJ/DW, none of the posts I saw had a self icon, although nearly 10% (10/102) used a representation of self. On nonfandom LJ/DW, 25% (5/20) used self icons and 10% used representations of self.

By contrast, almost one-third of fandom journal posts (31) used icons of people (generally fannish BSOs) of opposite sex of the one the user publicly identifies as. What surprised me was that 8 posts used icons of people of the same sex. I'm used to seeing guys in icons, and 90%+ of my flist is female, so I never draw conclusions that male icon=male person. But I am oddly discomfited when nonfannish journals or people on nonfannish sites use icons showing people of opposite sex from the one they identify as. This doesn't happen frequently, but it does happen (although not in this particular count).

at livejournal